Joe McPhee & Paal Nilssen-Love - Song For The Big Chief [PNL Records 046]

Put on the circuit via his very own PNL Records imprint on October 4th, 2k19 is "Song For The Big Chief" which sees Paal Nilssen-Love collaborating with long time co-adventurer Joe McPhee live at Cafe Oto in London on December 9th, 2k17. With the duo dedicating their concert to drummer Sunny Murray who had passed away shortly before the concert and opening with a 23 minutes spanning variation of "Old Man River" as title track "Song For The Chief (Old Man River)" the two artists are paying an intense tribute to one of their major influences in music, pushing the original cut further and further into an intense, thundering maelstrom of improvisation whilst harking back to its original feel and melancholy around mid-track, breaking things down before building up towards a metallic, percussive climax once again. Furthermore the performance of "Knox" presents highly technical sax playing atop advanced drum grooves for those in the know whilst never losing a certain intrinsic melancholia whereas the final cut "A Fantasy For Lester" explores fully experimental territories, touching on scraping electro-acoustic minimalisms and distant echoes of Ambient rather than actual  Jazz for the majority of its playtime of nearly eight  minutes although slowly coming back to free-floating Jazz aesthetics in its second half. One of the more accessible album releases on PNL Records, this.

Album artwork on Instagram!